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[Garrison Hilliard <garrison@efn.org>]

Mary Shafer wrote:

>Apatosaurus-style, you mean.  Brontosaurus is gone; there is no more
>thunder in the saurians.
>

Screw that noise; it's still a Brontosaurus to me, even if it had the 
wrong head on it. And while we are at it, it's not a Dynamosaurus 
imperiosus, it's a Tyrannosaurus Rex! Stephan Jay Gould was right (on 
this at least), it's a bunch of busybody paleontologists mucking about 
in museum basements looking around for easy glory who do this 
name-changing crap! Any _real_ paleontologist is out there in the snake 
and scorpion infested deserts of the world, cooking by day, freezing by 
night, looking for the elusive fossil remains of the Oviraptor...the 
dinosaur with the most screwed-up looking head of them all: 
http://myhome.naver.com/tankpen/main/gallery/gallery/oviraptor_1.gif 
....and when he locates them, and gleefully reaches for them, they 
suddenly pull themselves under the Gobi sands....for the wily Gobi 
man-eating plant (Mortabotanus Gigantus) can form it's pestles into 
whatever shape it desires, and knows that Oviraptor fossils are as 
irresistible to a paleontologist as a whorehouse is to a sailor; and 
soon another moth-eaten fedora a is spat forth  from beneath the sands 
by the ravening florid, to join the thousands that blow about in the 
cold Gobi night.
Meanwhile, the old busybody name-mucker dies like the petty little 
wastrel he is- crushed beneath toppling leg bone of a sauropod he was 
trying to rename; his mummified body found years later by the next 
little piss-ant "paleontologist" who ventures into the museum basement 
on the same despicable mission!

Pat
Pat Flannery (flanner@daktel.com)